BlackBerry OS Considerations when exporting...

[rdebits]

Greetings All!

Thank you for reading this post. I wanted to share some information with the CrackBerry community in hopes of gaining a better understanding of what can be considered standard operating procedure when exporting themes for the BlackBerry App World.

I recently attended the BlackBerry Developers Conference back in September and there was one session in particular that really resonated with me. The session was on the BlackBerry App World and provided analytical data on who was buying themes, where, on what device, and on what operating system.

I guess, not surprisingly about 70% of all purchases made on the App World were on the 5.0 operating system. That statistic was back in July, which is almost an eternity. I think it's safe to assume that 70% is now closer to 80-85% and increasing.

This particular detail (among many important others) made me re-address my theme development. When I first started to develop themes, there was no 5.0 OS. So when exporting, I went for the lowest common denominator. After testing my themes I found that if a theme was exported at 4.5, it would run just fine on a device that may have been upgraded to a 4.6 OS. However, things really started to hit the fan when 5.0 came out, and everyone started to upgrade.

If a theme was exported at 4.5 or 4.6 (sub 5.0) OS, and a person with a 5.0 OS device purchased that theme, the theme would only show up on the home screen The application screen would sometimes be white, or of the previously activated themes. As the 5.0 became more widely released across more devices, more and more customers started to complain that their purchased theme only partially worked.

So based on the data supplied by BlackBerry, I decided to go back and re-export my themes for the highest possible OS and do the same for new themes moving forward. As the new releases were approved and launched I received new customer support e-mails from customers saying their theme disappeared. This would be because a theme exported at 5.0 does not show up in the Themes folder on non 5.0 OS devices. After notifying the customer that an upgrade was available for their device did they finally re-discover their theme after upgrading their device.

Basically I made the decision to build and export for the highest OS, and if a customer happens to purchase a theme on a sub 5.0 device then they simply need to upgrade their device.

Anyhow, I wanted to share if you my thoughts and process flow. Please feel free to respond however you please.

Thank you for reading,

Ryan

[hastings]

Story of my life.

Every single day I walk a customer or five through an OS update on any number of BlackBerry models. I only support OS 5, and there are a ton of customers still using OS 4.6.

[BBThemes]

with appworld where you upload your versions, name one 8500a, choose just the 8520 then select os4.6.1 and higher, then click for another upload (as if your doing multiple devices) and call it 8500b, choose the 8520, 8530 9300 and 9330 and select OS5. then users running 4.6 will get handed the 4.6 version, and users on os5 will be handed the os5 version.

i know alot of people arent supporting os4.6/4.7 anymore, however so many people still use them, and you have to consider that some users will never update, or wont for ages (some enterprise users and people that dont realise) and for the extra few minutes effort to cover 100% rather than 70-80% of your market it just makes sense